Modified On January 8, 2005
Murray Olderman, writing for the Los Angeles Times, writes the definitive article on Fred Sheldon Greenfield, who is more famously known as Shecky Greene.
His capers have become legends, some true, some apocryphal. Like the one about his driving his car into the fountain at Caesars Palace. When the cops arrived, the windshield wipers were going. Greene rolled down the window and said, “No spray wax.”
“I had a bad habit when I got drunk, and I think it must have been a death wish: to get in my car and just drive,” Greene says. “One night I drove 90 miles an hour down the Strip—which you couldn’t do now, crowded as the Strip is—and I hit this breakaway lamp at the entrance to Caesars. It went shearing across Las Vegas Boulevard, and I went right over the curb and into the water. The cops came, and I went. I told Buddy Hackett about it. He gave me the line about the spray wax, and I put it in my act.”
The rest of the article is mandatory reading for rabid fans of standup comedy. We’re just thrilled that the 78-year-old Greene is alive, healthy, relatively sane and, we would hope, ready to gig again. We’re frequently asked if the magazine is “all about Shecky Greene” or “named after” the famous comic. We respond that neither is 100 per cent true. The truth is that “Shecky” has become a generic term for a funny person, for one who strives to amuse. Add to that the fact that for three decades, Shecky Greene’s name (first and last, or just his first name alone) was, for many, synonymous with Vegas, with standup comedy, with live standup.